It’s that time in the decade when people like me – professional monitors of mass culture – look back at the preceding 10 years and try to make sense of it. Give it a shape. Problem is, I’m finding that it all feels a bit foggy and formless. The chronology of the 2010s is jumbled and indistinct, its peaks and landmarks hard to pinpoint.
Without consulting end-of-year lists, I’m not even sure I could tell you what came out in the 2010s and in what sequence. All that remains are faint after-images of things that were utterly absorbing at the time of listening or watching, but seemed swiftly to vanish into the void of the recent past. I binged my way avidly through shows such as Sex Education or BoJack Horseman or Atlanta, then promptly forgot their very existence, until the startling reminder of a new season being announced. There is always something new to watch, after all: an endless, relentless wave of pleasures lined up in the infinite Netflix queue.
The reason that it feels like nothing happened in the 2010s is that too much happened. Each cultural landmark got instantly effaced by the onrush of the next, and the next. This memory-erosion effect is one reason why it feels like something’s gone awry with our sense of time. While the clock and the calendar continue to plod forward in their steadfast and remorseless way, what you could call “culture-time” feels like it’s become unmoored and meandering.
That process had already begun in the first decade of the 21st century, with file-sharing and YouTube creating a vast, disordered open-access archive of past pop culture, that mingled promiscuously with current releases to create an effect of atemporality. This dizzying power of total and instant recall went into hyperdrive during the 2010s, thanks to streamers such as Spotify, Netflix and Amazon. Rather than simply usurping the place of the old mass-media monoculture, these gigantic platforms have a curious effect of simultaneously unifying and fracturing. Instead of inviting consumers to tune into a shared cultural experience at a designated time, they encourage individualised trajectories through teeming repositories of art and entertainment. Slowly but surely, streaming is killing the idea of a mainstream.
Like Canute defying the tide of history, Daft Punk attempted a kind of monoculture reenactment on their 2013 album Random Access Memories. Renouncing “digital love” in favour of analogue production and “real” musicianship (human drumming!), they staged a homage to the lost golden age of record-making that had resulted in blockbusters such as Rumours and Off the Wall. The duo’s promotional campaign pointedly made use of old-fashioned pre-internet techniques like billboards and television ads. The entire project ached with nostalgia not so much for the monoculture as for monotemporality: “the event”, the mass synchronised experience of “the whole world” ardently focused on a single cultural artefact, from movies such as Stars Wars and Saturday Night Fever to records like Sgt Pepper and Thriller. The roll-out and the release succeeded in dominating public attention and critical discourse. Get Lucky ruled the radio for a year and Daft Punk cleaned up at the Grammys. Yet Random Access Memories rapidly and thoroughly evacuated itself from popular memory, to the point where it has barely featured in all the end-of-decade list-making.
The monoculture and that particular sense of shared temporality has not disappeared altogether. But like a dwarf star it has shrunk, and its power to irradiate the lives of everyone is much weaker. Even the astronomically famous have had to resort to ruses to commandeer public attention – like Beyoncé with her surprise release, in December 2013, of a self-titled “visual album”. But this kind of media ambush – designed to cut through the noise, like a radio station with a very powerful signal drowning out its rivals – only works for the already famous, those whose celebrity capital was built up during the earlier monoculture. For anybody smaller, it would be an act of promotional suicide.
It feels like there are fewer household names, more cult figures – and the gulf between the universally famous and the known-to-just-some grows wider and wider. A discussion about music with an old friend or a new acquaintance can go quite a long way before you find something that you have both heard. Not only there is a sprawling span of contemporary niche sounds and micro-genres, but there are several generations of ageing stars and tenacious fringe figures still out there gigging and recording, Meanwhile, the reissue industry constantly rescues obscure artists from oblivion and repositions them as deserving of attention and ear-time, while the amateur archivists of YouTube and album-sharing sites mop up anybody and everybody else remaining with a scintilla of significance.
Over the last decade, television has grown equally profuse and amorphous. For a moment at the turn of the 21st century, the culturally centralising role of TV seemed to undergo a renaissance in the form of the Golden Age of prestige drama and innovative comedy. Indie-film auteurs, blocked from a blockbuster-obsessed Hollywood in which superheroes and CGI ruled, charged into the small-screen medium, which now welcomed risky material and formal innovation. Appointment TV, the punctual convergence of large audiences for the latest episode of shows such as The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, kept alive the idea of the public as unitary bloc whose aesthetic horizons could be collectively expanded. But then came streaming, with its vastly enlarged menu of options and its flexibility of use. You could binge an entire series in one go, or catch up with it long after everyone else. Aware of the dangers of dithering and drowning posed by the very surfeit of choices they offered, streamers devised algorithms to “surface” programs that might appeal to your habitual tastes. But the downside of this attunement to the individual consumer is that fewer viewers are tuned into the same shows.
Streaming represents the next level in a general digital-era tendency: consumer control of time becomes vastly more personalised, but that experience of time becomes more brittle. The ability to stop and restart the flow of cultural information proves to be an irresistible temptation: pausing for a call of nature or a conversational digression, or to rewind a bit of knotty dialogue. Netflix is toying with a new feature that will allow viewers to watch programmes at 1.5x speed, allowing consumers to keep up with the challenging surfeit of must-see TV.
The idea of Spotify introducing a similar function seems unlikely: while a TV narrative could be compressed without loss of information, in a profound sense music simply is a particular experience of time, so altering its rate of flow would be to change its essence. But who knows? The challenge of too much music and too little time could drive a music fan to desperate measures. Research suggests that average song lengths have decreased significantly in response to streaming, while canny writers and producers are placing the chorus at the start of singles (such as High Hopes by Panic! At the Disco) to hook browsing listeners instantly. The rise of TikTok as a teenage go-to discovery engine for new music plays into this syndrome, with its 15-second fan-created videos that turn songs into bite-size samples at the pop supermarket.
A sense of sanity-endangering overload was already apparent in the 2000s. The shift between the first decade of the 21st century and the 2010s can be partly conveyed by the contrast between “torrents” and “streaming”. Both terms evoke the new liquidity of cultural products freed from solid form and turned into pure information. Visiting torrent sites or filesharing platforms was a purposeful activity, though – like going to an MP3 retailer such as iTunes except without a financial transaction taking place. Legal and illegal downloading alike was still tethered to the notion of music ownership, even if the collection was now infinitesimally inconspicuous, crammed into a hard drive or that antique object, the iPod.
Streaming seems less active, a steady state that turns music into a utility, something on tap – like water. Where obsessive accumulation of solid-form music or immaterial files involved passion and even an element of pathology, streaming breaks with the hunter-collector psychology. It’s like radio, except there’s little or no public dimension. Occasionally, your streaming selection will coincide with large numbers of other people – the waning flickers of the monoculture drawing you all to the same spot. But mostly your journeys through the library of sound are solitary and asocial.
“Scattered and shattered” seems like the right shorthand for both the disintegrating monoculture and the sensation of living with the overload of options (attention stretched every-which-way, frankly knackered by keeping up with it). But perhaps there are worse fates than drowning in a flood of great entertainment and popular art. And new possibilities emerge out of the rubble of the mainstream.
The 2010s has seen the rise of subcultures that exist largely or entirely online, as divergent as vaporwave, ASMR, UK drill, and makeup tutorials, but all of them nesting within huge platforms like YouTube or Bandcamp. Something like audio blogs or DIY radio, podcasts have become the focus of new communities. And the slow collapse of a centralising and synchronised common culture has opened up the space for a profusion of micro-scenes, each running on its own timeline. In this flourishing post-geographical world of “local” cultures not tied to location, small is bountiful and significance doesn’t need to be universal to matter.
